Archive for the ‘Corruption’ Category

This morning NPR/KQED did a program on the Vietnam Wall. I caught some of it. I get emotional over that time. People I knew died in that war. Their names stand on that massive black granite. That was my time, my youth. It sticks with me. It sticks in my throat. It brings tears to my eyes today. And I look at the country today and I think ‘What did they die for?’ Never mind that it was a misbegotten war. At bottom those men fought not against some vague Communist threat, but for a vision of America as a good, decent place where the ideal was equality and fairness for everyone, a place where everyone had a fair and just chance to make their life into whatever they wanted.

No more.

The country has become a cesspool of vile and ugly politics and greed and hatred. The politicians have sold their souls to the rich and the rich want everything else too. They want to live with their boot on the neck of the poor, of the workers, of the middle class. They degrade education so they won’t be challenged by people who can think, so they can provide a steady stream of mindless drones for their minimum wage jobs.

The men who died in Vietnam didn’t die so the Koch brothers and their kind could turn America into a fascist fantasyland. They didn’t die for Exxon to pollute the land and the air and the water for obscene profits. They didn’t die for a bunch of Tea Party ignoramuses and bigots to corrupt the political process with their ignorance and hatred.

But that’s where we are today. It is disgusting. This isn’t the America any soldier died for. This is an America of lies and greed and deceit. This is an America whose vision has been corrupted by small-minded men and women who trade in lies and greed and deceit to feather their own nests at the expense of every working man and woman, of every man and woman struggling to make a good and decent life for their family, of every man and woman battling for a decent education and a fair chance to build the life they want.

This is an America whose vision has been corrupted by hatred, by racism, by bigotry against the poor and the disadvantaged, by the hatred, the racism, and the bigotry of a small group of politicians and rich men who care nothing for the country and whose every thought they direct at taking everything they can get their manicured, soft hands on, taking everything they can from the poor, from the workers, from the people who made it possible for the rich to wallow in their excesses of wealth.

This cannot stand.

It must not stand.

If it stands there will be blood in the streets, there will be wailing in the nights, there will be a genuine war that will make the bloodbath of the American Civil War look like a picnic, the draft riots of that time like afternoon tea on the lawn, and from abroad people of other nations will see an America writhing in madness and insanity. And all so a few people, a handful of rich people and their kneeling servants in Congress, in every political system in America, can get for themselves more, and more, and more.

This cannot stand.

It must not stand.

It must not.

In the name of every man and woman who has died or been torn up fighting for a proud vision of a free and democratic America, this must not stand.

Wanna see the truth about your politicians? One of the truths anyway. The truth about why you have no voice, why they don’t hear your voice, why your life/job/finances/economy pretty much sucks. Take a look at the Upworthy site.

The Supreme Court decides on the Affordable Care Act (‘Obamacare’) today – well, they’ve already decided, they’re just going public today. I suspect they’ll uphold it because the ‘conservative’ justices are intellectually corrupt, if not in fact corrupt in other ways. It would have been better for the country and the world if the right-wing justices had been strangled in their cradles and never been allowed to hold high office. They crossed the Rubicon into corruption when they savaged the 2000 election to put their choice in office. That decision cost thousands of American lives and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afghani lives and the loss of trillions of dollars from the U.S. treasury.

Later, their Citizens United decision broke the back of democracy in this country. The supporting Montana decision Monday sealed the fate of freedom and sold the United States to its most venal, morally bankrupt citizens, people like the Koch Brothers and the financial backers of the Tea Party, as well as the corporate barons whose only interest in America is how to corrupt democracy to line their pockets.

It is likely that the Court will support the ACA, if for no other reason than that it puts vast sums of money into the pockets of the insurance companies and the already wealthy elites who will then buy more politicians and judges, ensuring that corruption will become absolute. These so-called conservative justices curry favor with the wealthy and the powerful. Their corruption ensures that their decisions conserve nothing of democracy, conserve nothing of liberty, conserve nothing of the Constitution, conserve nothing of what it means that the United States has existed at all.

At some point these, or other, justices may decide that Citizens is a bad decision and seek to overturn it. By then it will be too late. Their decision will be ignored by the corporate lackey government that Citizens is right now creating. Future justices who seek to right the wrongs of Citizens will either be ignored or they will be spoken to harshly by the new barons ruling the country or they will be assassinated, either physically or in reputation.

Fair repayment indeed for the Supreme Court’s persecution and assassination of democracy in America.

Politico is running a story about Bachmann admitting now that she has been a Swiss citizen for thirty-four years.

Devious wench, eh?

She’s claiming dual citizenship since she married the Swiss guy who runs the anti-gay clinic with Medicaid money. Problem is neither she nor he notified the Swiss government, nor the United States government.

But really, who cares? She’s just another mindless fundogelical freak out to corrupt the United States and make as much money as she can while doing it.

But maybe we ought to see her birth certificate. You know, just to make sure she really is an American and not a Swiss spy. And after all, if she ‘forgot’ to notify the United States government that she held dual citizenship while serving as a Representative in Congress, and serving on the freaking House Intelligence Committee, what other little details has she conveniently ‘forgotten’ to reveal?

And really, folks, she ran for President, remember? Do we really want a Swiss person sitting in the Oval Office? A faux Swiss person at that? After all, those people enable wealthy tax criminals like Mitt Romney and the like to hide money from the United States Internal Revenue service while the rest of us pay their tax tab. Kinda makes you wonder how much she and the Doctor have squirreled away in one of those secret numbered accounts, eh?

She claims she was born in Iowa. But hey, anybody can say that about themselves. And she does have that weird accent that speaks of something not really American. I dunno, folks, I dunno.

Yeah, let’s see the birth certificate, Michelle. The real one. How about it? Come on! Obama showed you his. Now you show us yours.

Everybody’s favorite fat fatheaded drug addict, the bouncing baby-brain of the Republican Tea Party, that wishful wonder who vomits hatred, bigotry, and illogic as easily as the rest of us breathe, has demonstrated once again how and why he’s leading America down into the sewers of irrelevance, ignorance, and genuine, deep, profound stupidity. That would, of course, be Rush Limbaugh, disgusting depraved diva of the right.

The other day a Georgetown University law student named Sandra Fluke testified before a House committee about hormonal contraception and the medical need it serves for purposes other than preventing pregnancy.

Her appearance and testimony followed the perversion of the issue by Rep. Darrell Issa, who held a hearing on President Obama’s regulation requiring religious-affiliated entities to provide contraception in their health care plans. Issa and his Republican Tea Party conspirators invited no women to testify and explicitly refused Ms. Fluke from testifying, declaring that the issue was religious liberty and not contraception.

It is rumored, though unconfirmed, that after the hearing Mr. Issa swallowed a Viagra paid for by his taxpayer-funded health insurance policy and banged an intern in the chapel as an expression of his religious liberty.

And here’s what the fat boy, the sucker of microphones, the Pied Idiot of the Republican Ratboys of the Raging Right, had to say about Ms. Fluke:

"What does it say….that she essentially says that she must be paid to have sex. What does that make her? It makes her a slut, right?It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex. She’s having so much sex, she can’t afford the contraception. She wants you and me and the tax payers to pay her to have sex. What does that make us? The pimps."

Ms. Fluke gives honest testimony about an important issue to a Congressional Committee and the best argument, the best reasoning that the bouncing druggie can provide to his legions of brain dead followers is to pervert her testimony and call her a slut.

That’s all he’s got. Name calling. No facts. No thought. No logic. No reason. Just schoolyard name calling. Just ‘nyah nyah nyah slut’.

And for this behavior his corporate advertisers see that he makes tens of millions of dollars a year. For leading the country into a sewer of ignorance, hatred, bigotry, and unfettered stupidity, his sponsors, who apparently do not care for America, do not love the country, are not in the least patriotic, reward him handsomely.

Fat boy sucks up the money he’s paid to act like an idiot. He gets on his knees every day before his golden microphone, opens his mouth, and spews out hatred and sucks in money.

So who’s the real whore?

And what does it say about all his johns – corporations and listeners? Real flag wavers, every last one, waving flags that look like Old Glory, but are made of a tissue of lies and ignorance and greed that disgraces the real flag and shames the nation.

It’s simple. If you listen to Limbaugh, if you take him seriously, if you believe anything he says, you hate the United States of America.

The Republican Tea Party makes a lot of noise accusing the Democrats, or anybody to the political left of the RTP screamers, of trying to redistribute the wealth, of handing over taxpayer money to the lazy poor who refuse to work, a category of citizens that includes everyone who is not a Republican or not wealthy enough to give gobs of money to the RTP.

The so-called redistribution of wealth is, in the cowled eyes of the RTP stalwarts, socialism or communism or tyranny or whatever the flavor of crap Rush Limbaugh and Grover Norquist are handing out that day.

As a result of RTP (and its predecessor Republican Reagan Party) influence and actions over the past thirty years or so, we have, ironically, seen wealth redistributed. Taxpayer money has flowed up to the wealthy, who have used it to buy politicians, buy legislation favorable to the acquisition of more and more wealth, and undermine democratic representative government in the United States. So simply on that score alone the RTP show themselves to be hypocrites pandering to the wealthy classes by distributing to them the money generated by the middle class and the working class and the working poor.

And in fact there are not enough wealthy people to do what the RTP ideologues believe wealthy people do. They cannot spend enough, consume enough, if you will, to make a mass society whole and functional. The money flows to them and stops. The only way to get it flowing is to pry it from them by taxing it.

Unfortunately for American society, a one-way flow of cash is a sure way to destroy American civilization. A civilization thrives on the circulation of money throughout the society, on money flowing down and up and laterally. Money’s the grease for the wheels of civilization. When one class of people collects the bulk of the money, the wheels stop turning and the society risks collapsing on itself and turning to chaos instead of rational governance.

The RTP is okay with that. They don’t want to spend taxpayer money on anything other than making sure that the wealthy keep their privileged status and pay little or no tax. That is their stated position. They’ve stated it over and over. It is their only position on governance, other than maintaining and expanding an already oversized military which they use to brutalize any third world country they decide they don’t like e.g., Grenada, Panama, most of Central America, Vietnam, Laos, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran soon enough, etcetera ad nauseam. That’s pretty much the sum of the RTP programs and policy.

Unfortunately for the RTP one of the primary functions of government, of successful government, is the redistribution of wealth. Government collects taxes from the citizenry and puts that money to work where it will do the most good in maintaining a vital, thriving, democratic society. Government doesn’t do that perfectly: as a classic example of imperfection one need only remember the famed Alaskan “Bridge to Nowhere” sought by the Republican establishment a few years ago. But on the whole, under a reasonable and rational government, the system works to the benefit of society.

Suppose somewhere in the state of Iowa there exists an important bridge that is on the verge of failure. It is beyond patching and must be replaced. One might note that there are many such bridges in the country.

The state of Iowa can raise half the money, say, and turns to the Federal government for the rest. The Feds provide the money, from taxpayer funds (which is where all the money comes from in the first place), in the form of a loan, or perhaps a grant, or some other financial vehicle. Iowa can then proceed to design and build the new bridge.

But it is not government that builds the bridge. The Iowa Rundown Bridge Authority hires a private design firm and a private engineering firm.

Those two companies can now afford to hire some new people, and maybe expand their physical plant, thus putting some construction companies to work. Perhaps they buy new computers, putting a couple of more people to work at a computer company in Colorado.

Eventually steel is ordered, and concrete, and lumber. Those manufacturers might hire more people, buy more goods, buy more equipment, distributing the wealth, as it were.

Finally construction begins. Construction workers are hired and begin to draw their wages. They might now be able to afford to improve their house, buy a new car, buy a new home, and so on. Every purchase of goods helps more companies, helps more people, helps the society. Tax dollars have been distributed where they are needed and society benefits.

The RTP holds that money should go to the top, to a few people, to their so-called job creators. In fact those people do not create jobs, other than in minor ways, perhaps by hiring undocumented immigrants to cut their lawns, or increasing the number of financial drones in the bowel that is Goldman Sachs and the like. The wealthy invest their money in financial instruments that make more money but that don’t benefit society, if at all, anywhere near the level of benefits that building that new bridge in Iowa brings to society. Wealthy people are economic dead ends. Money flows to them and stops. The RTP would have the rest of society stand there with hands out hoping for the wealthy to trickle some money onto them. The RTP’s oft-stated philosophy claims it would do away with handouts, and yet they virtually guarantee that handouts are all that are left for the bulk of the citizenry.

And yes, there are problems with this model of economic operation. To function it must have constant growth: more and more people must buy more and more goods. In the long run it is unsustainable, and in fact, considering what we have done to the environment that we absolutely depend on to sustain life on the planet, that system is deadly.

Controls are needed. Regulations are required. Governance must depend on rational, logical choices and decisions based on the best science and knowledge we can obtain. Growth must be constrained with the least damage to populations, and ultimately population must be constrained. These are legitimate concerns and must, absolutely must, be acted upon relatively soon.

But if the United States continues to act in ways that continue the RTP’s actual and stated policies, the country will fail to thrive, fail to survive. The United States is not “exceptional”, as the RTP and other juvenile minds crow and boast. It is subject to the same logic, the same failings, as every other empire throughout history. The sooner the United States and its adolescent leadership give up the idea of being special, of being exceptional, of existing outside the laws of governance and science and human behavior, the sooner it can confront reality and deal with its problems and help to lead the world away from the brink.

But for better or for worse, that bridge in Iowa must be built if the country is to survive.

When finished you may go out and kick the shit out of any Tea Bagger you find. Don’t worry, you won’t hurt them: they have neither brains nor hearts, and whatever spark of humanity they may have is dedicated to destroying what’s left of democracy, freedom, human decency, and educated intelligence in the United States.

Note the really key comment in the article, that of the eight Republican assholes on stage, all of whom want to be President of the United States, not one objected to the cheers of the audience, an audience comprising your friends and neighbors and relatives who want sick people without insurance to suffer and die.

Listen hard, people, because these sick motherfuckers are all around you.

The Republican darling from Texas who wants to gather to himself all the perks of the White House and will tell any lie and live any hypocrisy to get him there, and has for all his life taken every taxpayer dollar he can get his grubby hands on, is taken apart by Jim Hightower in this piece over at Common Dreams.

A taste:

Worse, probe even a millimeter into the million-jobs number that he is sprinkling around like fairy dust, and you’ll learn that Perry’s jobs are mostly "jobettes" that can’t sustain a family. They come with very low pay, no health care or pension, and no employment security, labor rights or upward mobility — many are only part-time and/or temporary positions.

Here’s a particularly revealing stat that the Perry pixies don’t want us to see: On his watch as governor, Texas added more minimum wage jobs than all the other 49 states combined. More than half a million Texans now work for $7.25 an hour or less. He can brag that he’s brought Texans down into a tie with Mississippi for the highest percentage of workers reduced to poverty pay.

And Hightower notes that Perry has spent pretty much his entire life sucking at the public teat.

So when this taxpayer-supported lifer flits into your town to declare that he will slash public benefits and make government "as inconsequential as possible," he means in your life, not his.